Spirit of KuGompo an enduring thread through region’s vision for freedom

Two histories, one war. Two radically opposed visions for the place known as East London, and now KuGompo, were forged in violence. The nostalgia for “good old England” is a comforting fiction that sidesteps a harder truth — our history was not peacefully transplanted from Britain but carved out in frontier wars, dispossession and resistance.

I recently came across an 1848 notebook at Rhodes University, written by Sir Harry Smith, the forceful and often ruthless colonial governor who directed Britain’s bloody Eastern Cape frontier wars against the Xhosa people. The notebook appears in Bruce Gordon’s 1932 MA thesis,East London: Its Foundations and Early Development as a Port. It is revealing not only of Smith’s military thinking, but also of his imaginative ambitions.

With his pen, he dished out many of our city’s names, beginning with the phrase “little East London”. While Smith drafted plans for his colonial utopia, the Xhosa nation was gathering its strength. In the face of repeated invasions, chiefs and warriors drew inspiration from KuGompo — the rock on the coast west of the Buffalo River that symbolised courage, resilience and the will to resist.

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The story begins with Smith’s desire to detach the eastern frontier from the Cape Colony and create a new “little England” in the east, with its capital at East London. On May 10 1835, following the Sixth Frontier War, also known as the War of Hintsa, Governor Benjamin D’Urban annexed the territory between the Keiskamma and the Kei rivers, declaring it Queen Adelaide Province.

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